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<TITLE>Announcing a CSW plugin for QGIS</TITLE>
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<P><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Hey Folks,</FONT></SPAN>
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<P><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Well the second plugin of the community plugin repo has been released. It deals with CSW (catalogue services for the web), an OGC spec for searching catalogues.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">There is a text file the comes shipped with the plugin of a few CSW servers that may be of interest.</FONT></SPAN>
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<P><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Currently you can do the following</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* Use preloaded catalogues</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* Add new catalogues</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* select a catalogue to search</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">*define keywords (empty keywords still cause an issue, so a default keyword 'birds' is hard coded in but does not return results on all catalogues)(Currently accepts a comma separated list)</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* capture the current bounding box of the QGIS map</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* define own manual bounding boxes (pre-coded for the world extents)</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* Temporal is included in the interface but not all CSW servers support temporal searching</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* Choose between datasets or services (this can be expanded in the future)</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* Define maximum returned results (max is 100 currently but can be changed)</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* view a returned result list</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* select a single record to view a summary record</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* copy resource links for entry into WMS and WFS plugins</FONT></SPAN>
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<P><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Still To Do:</FONT></SPAN>
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<P><SPAN LANG="en-ca"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* There is a bunch of error handling that needs to happen</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* packaging and releases</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* integrating into the python plugin loader</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* get OWSLIB into OSGEO4W</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">* Hopefully we can work towards initiating the MAP IT button so that the WMS and WFS plugins are clalled using the resource URL automagicaly. Currently you need to copy and paste the url.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Purpose:</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">I created this plugin for testing and professional development purposes. To this end there are options to see constructed XML calls that are sent to the service and also the full response in XML. These might be annoying to regular users but meets the needs of developers learning about this spec.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Dependencies:</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Currently you require the OWSlib site-package installed. This library allwos for all the processing of OGC services using python. Less work for us and other python plugin developers working with OGC specs.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Source:</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">The SVN tree is browseable and downloadable from Source forge…..</FONT></SPAN>
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<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN><A HREF="http://qgiscommunitypl.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/qgiscommunitypl/python/qgcsw/"><SPAN LANG="en-us"><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">http://qgiscommunitypl.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/qgiscommunitypl/python/qgcsw/</FONT></U></SPAN></A><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN>
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<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Coments and contributers welcome on our mailing list:</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN><A HREF="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qgiscommunitypl-discussion"><SPAN LANG="en-us"><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qgiscommunitypl-discussion</FONT></U></SPAN></A><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN>
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<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Enjoy.</FONT></SPAN>
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